At the moment, I'm leaning towards having "the bowling alley" being one of several programs available in that early holodeck we saw in TAS' "The Practical Joker". Solves a multitude of problems that way.

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I was just reading through a thread over on John Byrne's site concerning his latest Star Trek mini for IDW and I came across this post of his regarding a question about, you guessed it, the bowling alley:

Posted by John Byrne:

Since Roddenberry (retconning, imho) claimed that the holodeck was part of
his original plans for the show, and only the limitations of technology
prevented him for showing it aboard the original Enterprise, I will
suggest that the "bowling alley", if there was one, would be located there,
so as not to waste space!

Riley's pause, in "The Naked Time", might even be used to argue for this.
He takes a beat to decide what form the location of his party will take!

I think the bowling alley as part of the simulations is the bigger retcon but via his and your logic it makes sense. I'd just again argue that you depict this holodeck as more limited than its TNG counterpart.

Well, I don't know about any holodeck on TOS Enterprise...
And I've never heard anything about the Great Bird wanting one there...
I think you're all non-bowlers... ya... that's my theory... un-huhn...
you're all rabid anti-bowl-ites...

At the moment, I'm just trying to keep this thing within easy reach, so that when Shaw gets to a certain point, which he's getting within sight of, I won't have to go digging back into the archives to drag this sucker back into the light.

^Why would you need Shaw to get to a certain point? Can you not do any work on your own?

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I thought that he had already done quite a bit... on my system I have a folder for blueprints of the TOS Enterprise, within that folder I have folders for different people's work (that I use for ideas and inspiration), which includes the following...

At the moment, I'm just trying to keep this thing within easy reach, so that when Shaw gets to a certain point, which he's getting within sight of, I won't have to go digging back into the archives to drag this sucker back into the light.

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Whether you believe it or not, I actually enjoy reading such threads from time to time and it is more than disappointing to see such a thread bumped for no reason whatsoever.

On a first pass of comparing Shaw's bridge dome to mine, it would appear that my estimate of the size of the pilot dome is actually a tad too small, which is good, because that indicates that I won't have to tweak anything to fit the bridge under the dome facing forward, and might not have to drop it down as far as I was estimating.

Since Roddenberry (retconning, imho) claimed that the holodeck was part of
his original plans for the show, and only the limitations of technology
prevented him for showing it aboard the original Enterprise, I will
suggest that the "bowling alley", if there was one, would be located there,
so as not to waste space!

Click to expand...

[/QUOTE]

Wait. How... would limitations in special effects technology prevent the holodeck in TOS?

Let's think about this.

It's a room that creates a holographic simulaiton of reality. So if you want to visit The Old West, you put in an Old West program. Or if you want to take a walk in a grass covered park, you put in the Grass Covered Park program.

What exactly is the technology limitation? Make a big empty room.
Do a 'shimmery' effect like they did with The Cage. (Basically the transporter effect for the week)
Presto! You're in a holographic simulation!